An Israeli worker hangs a campaign billboard of U.S. President Donald Trump shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a Jerusalem building on Feb. 3, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Earned media, it’s said, won Donald Trump the U.S. presidency. Now he appears to be paying it forward to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Earned media is the exposure a candidate doesn’t pay for. Trump, by virtue of his celebrity, outspokenness and outsider status earned plenty of it during the 2016 election. The investor newsletter The Street estimated that Trump got $5 billion in earned media in that campaign, more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined.

Netanyahu, facing a credible challenge on April 9 from Benny Gantz, the former military chief of staff who heads the new Blue and White Party, is about to get a cascade of earned media thanks to Trump.

Next week, two weeks before Israel holds its election, its prime minister gets not one but two days at the White House (usually, leader-to-leader visits can be wrapped up in a day) and a “first couples” dinner. On Wednesday, Netanyahu picked up face time and lavish praise from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was in Israel for a visit. Last month, Trump posted a Netanyahu campaign poster – a massive banner featuring Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands – on his Instagram account.

Is this unusual? And why is Trump doing this? Here are some answers.

It’s not unprecedented – but it is rare.

Then-president Bill Clinton went all out to keep Shimon Peres in office with Netanyahu gaining ground on the Labor leader in the 1996 election. Additionally, Hamas and its allies were battering Israel with a series of suicide bombings.

Netanyahu wanted out of the Oslo peace process, which at that point was Clinton’s signature foreign policy achievement. Clinton organized a terrorism conference on the Red Sea that March, less than three months before Israel’s election, to show that Peres could command the attention of regional Arabs. Notably, the Trump administration tried something similar: Last month it organized a conference of Middle East leaders, including Netanyahu, in Poland that was supposed to be about confronting Iran until it morphed into a murkier meeting about reinforcing “regional alliances.”

Never mind, Pompeo assured Israelis on Wednesday, it was a coup for their prime minister.

“This meeting is part of our effort to continue to build out the regional alliances,” Pompeo told reporters in Jerusalem, standing next to Netanyahu. “Last month, representatives of more than 60 countries met in Warsaw and had a historic conference which the prime minister attended.”

The ginned-up conference didn’t work for Clinton, by the way, as Netanyahu narrowly won the ’96 election.

So it’s happened at least once. Is it untoward?

It is heavy-handed, said Dan Arbell, a former deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

“By providing Netanyahu with these photo ops, the Trump administration shows it is favouring Netanyahu,” Arbell, a scholar in residence at American University’s department of history, said in an interview.

Then-president Barack Obama declined to meet with Netanyahu in March 2015 when Netanyahu was here on the eve of Israeli elections.

“We have a practice of not meeting with leaders right before their elections,” Obama said at the time.

Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a conference call Monday whether his Jerusalem visit looked like he was favouring Netanyahu, Pompeo suggested that the optics were not a primary concern for him.

“I’m not worried about what someone may say,” Pompeo said. “I’m going there to meet with the leadership of Israel on a set of incredibly important issues that are time sensitive. The threats in the region are real. Radical Islamic terrorism, the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran are something that we work closely with our Israeli partners, that’s the focus of my visit, it’s what we’ll talk about, it’s the work that I will do while I’m on the ground there.”

To mitigate the impression of favouritism, the White House could have a meeting with Gantz, who like Netanyahu will be in Washington next week to address the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. So far, there is no sign that is happening. Pompeo told JTA that he did not know if he would meet with Gantz.

Why is Trump doing this?

A few possibilities:

Loyalty: Netanyahu, unlike leaders of other allies, has been unfailingly supportive of Trump, saying that Israel has never had a better friend in the White House. Have there been differences? Yes, most consequentially over Trump’s on-again, off-again policy of retreat in Syria. But Netanyahu has taken pains not to air those differences in public. There is very little Trump values more than loyalty.

Shared vision: Netanyahu has made his pro-Republican leanings obvious in recent years, and he and Trump are aligned on a number of issues: They share a similar hostility to radical Islam, speak often of confronting aggressors in the Middle East and have seen Saudi Arabia as a partner in advancing both governments’ interests. Netanyahu has also used Trumpian rhetoric about “witch hunts” and a rigged media to fend off charges of corruption; Trump may see a fellow victim of what even Netanyahu calls “fake news.”

The deal of the century: Another signal of Trump administration favoritism is the decision not to release the peace plan that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is drafting. The Kushner team does not want to embarrass Netanyahu with possible concessions as he battles the right and the left in the election.

Kushner and his team – Jason Greenblatt, the chief negotiator, and David Friedman, the ambassador to Israel – have forged ties with Israel’s government and may have tailored the agreement to hew to outlines that would be acceptable to the Likud, the party Netanyahu leads. A change in Israel’s government – particularly one that, unlike Trump and Netanyahu, could be committed to a two-state solution – could send them back to the drawing board. Kushner also has been close to Netanyahu for decades (Netanyahu slept in Kushner’s bedroom when he was a guest in New Jersey of Kushner’s father, Charles). And Friedman has a long association with Israel’s settler right.

Cover: Trump has gone on the warpath for the pro-Israel vote, calling Democrats the “anti-Jewish” party after its well-publicized internecine battle over a freshman congresswoman who has made statements that appear to invoke anti-Semitic slanders.

Jewish voters emphatically do not favor Trump. Despite pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal Netanyahu hates and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Trump registers as the least-liked president among Jewish voters since George H. W. Bush. Most salient, the majority of Jewish voters note his expressions of bias against Muslims and immigrants, and his equivocating when asked to denounce the far right. Polling shows that more than 70 per cent of Jewish voters blamed Trump’s rhetoric in part for fueling the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October.

Netanyahu and Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, have emphatically and repeatedly insisted that Trump is not an anti-Semite, nor does he facilitate anti-Semitism. More of that next week, in front of cameras, is something Trump would welcome.

Could Trump be any friendlier to Bibi?

Maybe. Israel’s Channel 2 reported Wednesday that Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy whose parole conditions have kept him in New York, has twice visited the Israeli consulate in recent days. Bringing Pollard home would be a major coup for Netanyahu; is a pardon in the offing?

Tributes are left near the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 16, 2019. (Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

(JTA) – The Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh is paying it forward.

The congregation has raised more than $40,000 to support the victims and their families of the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“We feel compelled to come to the aid of those communities, just as our Jewish community was so compassionately supported only a few short months ago by people around the world of many faiths,” the synagogue wrote on its GoFundMe page set up on Saturday. “We recall with love the immediate, overwhelming support Tree of Life received from our Muslim brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh.” [Read more…]

Jewish settlers praying in Joseph’s Tomb in the West Bank city of Nablus, Dec. 28, 2010. (Kobi Gideon / Flash90)

(JTA) – Two Palestinians were killed in Nablus in the West Bank after they threw explosives at Israeli soldiers who were guarding Jewish pilgrims praying at Joseph’s Tomb.

The explosives were thrown at IDF soldiers from a car late Tuesday night. The soldiers fired toward the vehicle, which also was hit by an IDF engineering vehicle, killing the driver and his passenger, according to the IDF. [Read more…]

(JTA) – Nearly 90 per cent of French Jewish students said they have experienced anti-Semitic abuse on campus, a poll found.

Nearly 20 per cent of the 405 respondents in the Ifop survey said they have suffered an anti-Semitic physical assault at least once on campus. Of those, more than half reported suffering violence more than once. [Read more…]

Rep. Ilhan Omar at a news conference on prescription drugs at the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 10, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., defended her critiques of Israel as calling for a more “balanced” policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also described Israel as the “historical homeland” of the Jews.

In the same op-ed Monday for The Washington Post, the Somali-American freshman lawmaker also reiterated her support for a two-state solution to the conflict, calling for “internationally recognized borders, which allows for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination.” [Read more…]

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Israel’s Supreme Court voted to disqualify Michael Ben-Ari, head of the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, from running in national elections over his racism and racist incitement.

The court decided on Monday by a vote of 8 to 1 in favour of an appeal by the Reform Movement in Israel, represented by the Israel Religious Action Center. That overturned a decision made by the Israel Central Elections Commission on March 12 to allow Ben-Ari to continue his campaign. [Read more…]

(JTA) – Jewish groups from New Zealand and beyond expressed their horror at the slaying of at least 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch Friday.

The New Zealand Jewish Council is “sickened and devastated” by the attacks, in which at least one armed individual killed dozens of people by shooting them at close distance with a semi-automatic rifle. Footage of the carnage, which the killer filmed and streamed live, shows victims huddling and moaning as the killer fires into the crowd. [Read more…]

(JTA) – Two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip reached the Tel Aviv area Thursday night.

Sirens alerted residents that rockets were coming into the area just after 9 pm local time.

Kan, the public broadcaster, quoted the Israeli army as saying that the rockets came from the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas. Kan said that reports in Gaza blamed Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group, for the rockets, although no group claimed responsibility.

The Iron Dome missile defence system intercepted one and the other landed in an open area.